Welcome back to the next installment of the “dreaded” book marketing primer. My goal is to make book marketing fun and easy, because I know how much you love the book you just poured your heart and soul into and how much you want to get it into the hands of your readers!

And that’s where the fun is: connecting with your ideal readers. Who did you write your book or ebook for? What aim did you have for your readers?What did you want them to gain from reading your book? What will compel them to say, “I have to have this book”?

These are the questions you asked when you started writing your book and these questions should be answered now that you’ve finished the book. So say your book is about life balance for working moms and your book shows this audience how to take care of themselves while also caring for their children, spouse, their home, and their work! Whew! Sounds like a great book that every working mom could use and would love to have.

So you know your ideal reader, now you just have to find them. Well, lucky you. This happens to be a clearly identifiable market. They’re everywhere. Working moms have websites, meetups, organizations, magazines, and conferences. And the subcategory of “work at home moms” is a growing segment of the marketplace, also easy to identify and locate. Use your handy search engine to do a search for this market and build a list of where you can find them. Also ask around to people in your personal and professional circles if they know anyone influential in this group or of organizations in this market.

Take the same steps for your market—whether they are sports nuts, animal lovers, college professors, retirees—whomever you’ve identified as your ideal reader.

As to how you will connect with these readers, we’ll base that on your book, your abilities, your preferences, your budget, and several other factors.

Stay tuned…

Happy writing (& marketing),

Andrea
Andrea Susan Glass

www.WritersWay.com

PS. If you live in San Diego you might want to check out the 21st Century Book Marketing Seminar. (www.21stcenturybookmarketing.com). It’s October 14-16. You’ll learn just about all you need to know about marketing your book!

It began innocently enough with MySpace, and multiplied like a virus out of control. What I’m referring to are social networking sites, also known as social media, or Web 2.0 (don’t know how it got that name!)

Today we have so many of these sites, I can hardly keep up. I’ve got profiles on LinkedIn, FastPitch, Merchant Circle, Ryze, Digg, Twitter, Del.icio.us, WomenIIWomen, a few more I can’t recall, and of course Facebook. I say of course Facebook, because that has become the darling of the business community.

It’s easy to use, and it’s actually a lot of fun! Almost too much fun, because I can spend hours inviting friends, answering friend requests, sending messages to my groups, accepting hugs, money, pets, flowers, and who knows what else! Oh, and letting people know what I’m doing right now!

Here are the facts about Facebook: It’s the 6th most popular website in the world, it has over 60 million active users, 250,000 new people join every day, it gets more than 65 billion (yes billion) page views per month, 56% of the members are over 25 years of age, 55% of the members are female, 35% of members earn more than $60,000/year, and 23% earn over $100,000/year.

I reveal these numbers to you, because they indicate the target market, and I think this is why Facebook members are targeting other members with all their products, events, groups, etc. It’s become a virtual hyper-active marketplace and meeting place. People are selling products, promoting events like teleclasses, and playing with more “applications” than I can keep up with.

Social networking was created as a simple tool for people to connect over the Internet. As a business, it can be easy to be dismissed as an average advertisement on these sites by the members. So here are a few things to keep in mind as you use social networking to expand your business:

1. Create an appealing profile. Sites like MySpace and Facebook allow you to make profiles that you can share with your “friends.” Your profile is like a mini-web page. Make it fun, colorful if you have the option, and attention-grabbing. This is where viewers have their first impression of you and your business. Take advantage of that and reel them in.

2. Be proactive. Very few people will come to you. Often, potential clients don’t know what they are looking for, so it is up to you to tell them. Take time out to devote to interacting with people online and accumulating “friends” which may become potential clients. It never hurts to have as many friends as possible; you never know who will employ your services.

3. Offer useful information. Social networking sites give users the ability to post bulletins and blogs that are automatically shared with your connected “friends.” Use this to post ads and updated information that your connections can see on their home page.

4. Stay in touch with your friends. When using the previous tips, be sure to post updates or ads at least once or twice a week. This will keep your name fresh in their minds and when they are ready to do business, they will be comfortable to do it with you.

Utilizing social networking sites for your business can be a valuable endeavor. Keep in mind these tips so your experience can be profitable and not wasteful.

If you have any other tips or advice, feel free to leave a comment to share with us!

Social networking has taken a whole new turn for business users. Traditionally, sites like Facebook and Myspace were simply social. They are a great place to meet new friends and reconnect with old ones. However, many have realized the possibilities of these sites for business expansion.

Have you ever attended a networking event? It may be difficult to get together a significant amount of people and then have to meet each one, pass out your card, and then they remember to call back or keep in contact. Well, with sites like these social networking ones, there are literally billions of people at your fingertips!

It definitely takes effort, but the payoff can be well worth it. The sites are free, so that is one obstacle covered. You need to take a proactive approach to these sites. Go out to any and every profile and introduce yourself. Yes, you can limit your searches to those who you feel would best suit your clientele, but this may only limit you. It never hurts to have too many friends and you never know who will want to employ your services.

You can post bulletins to all your friends at one time. These posts will appear on each of their home pages. This is FREE advertising at its finest! You can reach an endless amount of people at one time, as many times as you chose.

If you want a more guided path to these sites, there are forums for almost every topic under the sun. You can go to the forums, select any topic you wish, join, and start posting your thoughts and ads immediately.

This is a bandwagon we should all jump on. Leave your comments and tell us whether or not you find social networking sites to be beneficial for your business.

How do your articles get found? Through the search engines! Yes, they can be picked up through various sites and be stumbled upon by unsuspecting viewers, but most people look to sites like Yahoo, Google, or other popular search engines to find what they are looking for. The problem is that all those people do not know the title of your work, or that you are even out there. So you need to make yourself known and tell them, “You want me!”

Your article needs to be a gold mine of keywords. This is to say that you need to make sure your content contains those words that people will look for when they are searching for articles on your topic. You need to think of words that a potential reader would think is a great word to submit when looking for a particular site. For example, if your article is about online business promotion, you would want keywords such as business, Internet marketing, business promotion, and so on. Take yourself outside of the box and ask yourself, “If I were looking for this article, what words would I think of?”

Also, you need to make these words present in your article so as to increase your hits on the search engines. Don’t overflow your article with the same words over and over, this is only redundant. However, using a word or phrase 2 or 3 times can improve your stats on the search engines.

Go back and edit your articles and make sure you have the right keywords and the right amount of keywords present to make sure your article is chosen to be read. If all this is a little overwhelming, which to many it is, you can always hire a ghostwriter, like myself. So if this is going over your head a little, that’s fine, it’s my job to know this. As a professional, I can deliver a great article with all the tools it needs to succeed.Click here to see the many services I offer and how I can help promote your business today!